Taking the Plank Out of Our Own Eye

Rod Dreher, author of the much talked about Crunchy Cons, wrote an article provocatively entitled Evils of Capitalism in the Dallas Morning News that nails it. Dreher writes,

...[W]e can't pretend that our prosperity does not present us with serious civic problems. Consumer capitalism contains within its unfolding dynamic the seeds of its own destruction, to say nothing of the way it chews up traditional loyalties to faith, family, community and place.

We don't talk about this much in American politics, especially not on the right, where we've been supposedly waging a culture war for the traditional values cause for some time now. But we're starting to: The American Conservative, which excerpted Mr. Barber's book as a recent cover story, is fast becoming the most interesting political magazine on the right because it recognizes a simple but radical truth: When it comes to defending the things traditional conservatives cherish, big business is as much a threat as big government.

...and this is the plank that conservatives concerned about the moral/cultural health of the country need to take out of our own eye. It's simple to pick splinters out of the eyes of those godless liberals and big government coddlers, but in the end, we need to begin to look at how we have participated and promoted a political/economic agenda i.e., unfettered capitalism, that is as much or more responsible for the deterioration of traditional values and a decline in civility as anything else.